Monday, 29 April 2013

Waiting To Be Heard

While imprisoned in Italy for four years
over the murder of her roommate, Amanda Knox fended off sexual harassment from
guards and an overture from a cellmate. On the night of the killing, she was
smoking marijuana and watching a movie with her Italian boyfriend. And those
infamous cartwheels that Ms. Knox reportedly performed in the police station
never happened. Amanda Knox, an American, was convicted
and then acquitted of murder in Italy.

Those
assertions are among the many in “Waiting to Be Heard,” the long-awaited memoir
that is Ms. Knox’s most extensive public testimony since she was convicted, and
then acquitted, of killing her 21-year-old British roommate, Meredith Kercher.

An appeals
court acquitted Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito two years after their original
conviction and they were released. But in March, Italy’s highest court
overturned that decision ordering a new trial sometime in the next year.

Ms. Knox’s
book is scheduled for release on April 30. Harper Collins are convinced that
the intense publicity the case received, with its lurid details and the
courtroom spectacle of two Italian trials, would make the book a big seller and
reportedly paid a $4 million dollar advance.

While
saying she was the victim of bias and mistreatment by Italian authorities, Ms.
Knox also writes that her own mistakes contributed to her conviction. She
admits to being naïve, sometimes inappropriate and odd, too proud to admit when
her halting knowledge of Italian failed her. During the investigation, she
followed the directions of the Italian police “like a lost, pathetic child,”
she recalled. In 463 pages, Ms. Knox
recounts her darkest moments in prison — at one point, she writes, she imagined
committing suicide.

Ms. Knox exhaustively lays out her
defense, describing her whereabouts on the night that her roommate was killed.
She says that she and Mr. Sollecito were smoking marijuana, reading a Harry
Potter book aloud in German and watching the film “Amélie” at his apartment. She
pointed to the Italian prosecutors who she said willfully ignored and
manipulated evidence while they clung to the theory that she and Mr. Sollecito
were responsible for Ms. Kercher’s death.

According
to Ms. Knox’s account, the police interrogated her for hours and sporadically
slapped her on the back of her head. Eventually they goaded her into signing a
statement that implicated her and an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba, her boss at
a bar where she worked. At the police station, while Ms. Kercher’s British
friends huddled together in grief, Ms. Knox wrote that she paced the hallways,
dry-eyed, slamming the heel of her palm against her forehead in anger. “First I
showed not enough emotion; then I showed too much,” she wrote.

Since her return from Italy, Ms. Knox has
been living in Seattle. Executives from major publishing houses who met with
Ms. Knox last year said they were dazzled by her charm, intelligence and
forthright demeanor. HarperCollins, a News Corporation subsidiary, eventually
secured the rights in a deal brokered by the Washington lawyer Robert B.
Barnett. Whether Ms. Knox can win over the book-buying public is another
matter.

Will she
come across as an innocent abroad, a naïve college student ensnared by a
medieval Italian legal system? Or, as she has been portrayed in the Italian and
British press, a cunning seductress who engineered the brutal killing of her
roommate?

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